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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Small optanes (50-100 gigs) are quite accessible cost wise and solve most of the queue depth problem

Optane is neat tech, but it's also dead tech.

Tell me about it... Was just too expensive compared to flash. But the tech was definitely awesome and I hope it'll come back in one way or another.

When designing CedarDB, we recently had multiple instances where we thought: "If we had just a few KiB of Optane here ... "

Oh, it's amazing. I use a small chunk of it at home for ZIL, even though my synch writes are few and far between.

It's just approximately the Right Thing to use for some things, and I had room for it, and it was rather inexpensive when I bought it. :)

10/10, would recommend and buy again. (Whoops!)

I have various generations of optane I stocked up on for my own small business and home lab use, and fully agree.

I don’t know if you’re aware but Samsung introduced their own version of optane just shortly before Intel killed their product line. It was called Samsung Z and it was prohibitively expensive for some reason, but I didn’t hear that it was officially killed off (though it likely has been).

I found it deep in my Amazon “saved for later” but it’s no longer available: https://amzn.to/3z7QeGu

If it's just a few KiB then various NVRAM techs have been slowly creeping forward for decades. But they've never made it to datacenter storage.

https://www.avalanche-technology.com/wp-content/uploads/1Gb-... https://www.everspin.com/spin-transfer-torque-ddr-products

Does an SSD with power loss protection achieve the same level of performance, or is optane still better?

Are you taking the durability into account when you say kilobytes?

>dead tech.

Agreed in general, but surely for this usage case (i.e DB) it would still solve the problem, no?

Or am i missing something here

It does solve the problem for now, but the parts aren't being made anymore.

Maybe that's good enough for some people in some applications, but a lot of folks have very valid reservations about using EOL'd products regardless of how well-suited they may be at solving a problem.

I mean: It's like work trucks. I'm a huge fan of GM's Astro/Safari line of RWD cargo vans. Their 4.3l V6 is solid and adequately powerful, the 4L60E transmission is reliable, there's a ton of space in the back with enough height to load 4' tall sheet materials that are standing on edge, and to sit down in front of a bolted-down workbench, and the longitudinal RWD layout has advantages, they're even fairly easy to work on when something inevitably wears out, the deck height is low, and they're small enough to drive through a fairly normal parking garage without worry and to fit into a tight space.

They're pretty awesome (except maybe for safety and fuel economy, but perhaps those aren't my primary concerns), and they solve a particular set of problems very well.

But they aren't being made anymore, and haven't been made for over 20 years. I own one example of a GMC Safari that I'd like to get working well again some day and maybe kit out in some interesting way, but I'm absolutely not going to suggest that anyone buy a fleet of them to use in business because:

They, like Optane, are EOL'd. All of them that will ever be produced have already been made.

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"So can you explain to me again why you think we should be buying used, old parts for our new datacenter? I know you've told me before, but still not sure that I have the same perspective as you do."

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